Soyuz Launches New Crew Into Space

A Soyuz aircraft carrying astronauts from three different countries blasted into space atop a powerful booster rocket for a two-day ride to the International Space Station on Sunday.

Liftoff from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome took place at 8:40 a.m. local time (6:40 a.m. Moscow time), exactly on schedule. Federal Space Agency head Vladimir Popovkin said the launch went smoothly and that the astronauts were doing well, Interfax reported.

Russian cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko, NASA astronaut Sunita Williams and Japan's Akihito Hoshide looked relaxed on televised footage during liftoff, The Associated Press reported, and the crew knew they had escaped Earth's gravity when a toy doll given to Malenchenko from his daughter floated out of camera view.

The 49-year-old Malenchenko is the most experienced space traveller in the group, with a total of 514 days in space. During the current mission he will perform a fifth career spacewalk, adding seven hours to his more than 24 already spent in open space.

Williams, an Indian-American Navy pilot, holds the record for longest-duration space flight among female astronauts for her 195-day stint in space in 2006 and 2007.

The craft is scheduled to dock at the space station Tuesday at 8:52 a.m., where they will join Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin and U.S. astronaut Joseph Acaba.

The crew is in for a busy few weeks, as starting next week nine craft will dock with the space station over a 17-day period.

No normalization of ties between Ukraine and Russia is likely unless the region of Crimea, now under Russian control, is returned to Kiev's sovereignty, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said Tuesday.

Boris Nemtsov, an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin and Russia's role in the Ukraine crisis, has been shot dead outside the Kremlin in a murder that underscored the risks taken by the Russian opposition.

The murder of Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov has dampened any hope for a peaceful political transition in Russia away from President Vladimir Putin's government, Garry Kasparov, a prominent opposition voice, has said.

A spokesperson for Moscow's information technology department has denied media reports that some of the surveillance cameras around the Kremlin had been switched off at the time of Boris Nemtsov's murder.

The U.S. State Department and FBI have announced a $3 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Russian Yevgeny Bogachev, the highest bounty U.S. authorities have ever offered in a cyber case.